3 Reasons Why You Need Online Ordering

If you’re an independent operator, you may be thinking nah, I’m good. Maybe when/if I grow. Building a website with a menu and keeping that menu up to date is hard enough, but then adding an order functionality is adding a lot more labor = cost. As a result, a lot of restaurants use third parties like GrubHub & Yelp Eat24 to handle it. And those companies are great, but guess who loses a valuable customer touch point and guess who gains one? With their Loyalty programs, customers come back to them, not necessarily to you. Ouch.

1. Additional source of revenue! Just think about all the people who want to just order & pick-up. That’s a lotta people. Don’t believe me? Check out this survey from Oracle Hospitality. 56% of U.S. millenials want to order online – from their mobile device. Adding the ability to place an online order just opened you up to business you may not otherwise get. Even the possibility of that makes it worth a shot, right?

Additional research into consumer behavior shows that online orders are as much as 30% higher than orders place over the phone or in person! The CMO of Yelp Eat 24, one of the third party delivery companies, told Fast Company Mag that restaurants have confirmed this. And it makes total sense. If you call your nearby Chinese restaurant for take out, you’ll order what you know you like and what you know is on the menu. If instead you are looking at an online menu with pictures, you may try something new, something more expensive and you are more likely to add in extras.

2. Loyalty! If a customer is ordering online, you necessarily need to capture their information. You add this to your database & are able to connect with them for future promotions. And of course, reward their loyalty. Starbucks figured out the value of this early on. With the help of their loyalty program, they were able to turn an occasional splurge into a daily necessity. The graphic above also contains a great loyalty statistic – 52% of millennials want to have interact with a loyalty program on their mobile device. So, it sounds like we need to find an online ordering system that has an online functionality or is an integrated app…

3. POS Integration! Yes, this exists. And let’s be honest, this is the reason I’m writing this. Postec’s POS portfolio contains POS that have integrated online ordering + Loyalty + delivery. Take your little cursor over here and give it a click to see this great option: MobileBytes POS for iPad.

So let’s do it! Schedule a demo today to grow your bottom line with online ordering & see case studies of how it’s worked for other customers.